Preserved Wook is an oldtime New England railway engineman who calls to life again the history & technology not only of the steam locomotive in the LAST Steam Age of the Old Atlantic West, but of many a wonderful way of getting around in the World, in a better time when travel indeed was for the few…and the very few!

Letters In My Email: The Royal Hudson In The Park

Your line, Dr Al Bat(t!), in your column this week about “MNX” for ham and eggs, on the menu of the eating restaurant in Nevada, reminds me of a story our mother told, about how after 1942 during WW II she worked as a billing clerk on the old trucking midway, in St Paul. She worked for Murphy Trucking, Buckingham Motor Freight and Dakota Transfer, and the business was mostly trucking goods from the St Paul railhead out into the countryside. The truckers had kept going through the Depression by hauling bootleg whisky and so naturally there was the usual load of smalltime sharpies and 4-F’s still hanging around the loading docks, only now all dealing in hot batteries and rationed tires; the definitive history of the transportation-graft in WW II has never been done as yet!
One way or the other it was a high-pressure environment and Senior Clerk Dorothy Jensen was called “Ax Woman” by the younger workers. For some reason, she liked our mother, but Heaven help you in that war-work atmosphere if she did not. “It was like being in the nuthatch!” Mom said, there was an ungodly whole lot of government paperwork in wartime trucking, and so plenty of opportunity for supervisors to throw a whingding. Dorothy Jensen was out of Isanti, MN., and so that is maybe why she was particularly murderous and violently spoken when she found un-filed manila folders in the carts at the end of a shift. Who can say? People’s backgrounds explain it all, of course, and so a new filing clerk out of Waseca, MN., and in tears at the end of her first day at work, came to our mother who was out of Eagle Lake, MN., and just starting in on the evening shift. Dorothy Jensen could, and often did, fire people “right smack dab on the spot”. Anyway, the clerk was in a terrible state, Mom said. Any filing system is different and she simply could not find where all of the folders marked “LAX” went. This all is back before widespread air travel and so it is not a story about Nick Nolte and LA International. (Although Nick Nolte, Mom said years later, did look like some of the guys selling each other black market items on the loading dock.)
It is about LaCrosse, Wisconsin, partly at least anyway, and so Mom knew all about it of course.
The scrawled “LAX” in grease pencil — remember those? — was a kind of shorthand used by billing clerks on completed folders of invoices and simply meant they were to be filed under LaCrosse. That solved that mystery and our mother (did I mention she was out of Eagle Lake, MN., and that that place is only twenty miles from Waseca, MN.?) was relieved too because she had gotten the Waseca clerk her job in the first place! Once again the “Ax Woman’s” ire was evaded and, thirty years later, I myself would room downstairs from Dorothy Jensen in the Minneapolis Paul Franklin Apartments, on 26th Avenue South. A harridan no longer — “The world tamed me!” — she had fallen on hard times because her endless plans “to marry a rich OLD [her emphasis — EW] man” had not worked out.
When our mother worked for her half a lifetime before in fact Dorothy Jensen then had been working on yet another variant of her lifetime project, the latest of several schemes that had come to nothing:
“This one” sold not only tires and batteries but re-built engines as well, not from out on the loading dock which was cold and slippery in the Winter, but from out of his 1937 Packard instead, parked nearby with the motor running, and — best of all — he was sixty-one; but, to hedge her bet, he was only “one of a string of ponies” seemingly that Dorothy Jensen was playing. Reproved for “being cynical”, she assured the younger women that “it all just makes sense!” “I mean, Christ, it was like it was like getting one of these God-damn old men was the be-all and end-all and her God-damn calling in life,” said our mother thirty-some years later. It was all together a case of “love’s labors lost”, though, and when I knew Dorothy Jensen in her seventies none of her horses had made it around the track, she was feeding the neighborhood stray cats on the back porch and sick with diabetes.
But anyway in the Summer of 1978 we piled into my old 1964 Mopar with the Slant-6 and drove to Minnehaha Falls Station in South Minneapolis, to look at the CPR oil-fired 4-6-4 “Royal Hudson” locomotive on display there. There was full head of steam up and so Dorothy Jensen insisted on getting in line with the school children to scramble up into the cab to pull the cord and blow the whistle. It was hard going, not without danger of a bad fall and I came up from below, reaching up and around Dorothy Jensen’s hind legs to hang on to the grab rails as tightly as I could. The trainmen fished for her from above and they let her blow the whistle not once but three times.
Dorothy grinned all over her face and said it all sounded like when she was a little girl, “only real close up!” Then we climbed down. I went first, reaching up and around her hind legs to hang on to the grab rails as tightly as I could. The trainmen let Dorothy Jensen down gently, and that was our last outing as I went into the Peace Corps later that year.

Neither our mother or Dorothy Jensen ever evinced a whole ungodly lot of interest in meeting once again in those later days; they both felt like “it’s over and done with, let it be”.